Russian liberals fear return of dictatorship

Two main interpretations of the Duma election results were current in Moscow yesterday, and they were almost diametrically opposed.

The pessimistic view was that Russia risked a return to a more authoritarian age, in which progress towards further democracy, a law-governed state and more market reforms was postponed or shelved.

The liberal reformers, who did not receive a large enough proportion of the vote to be represented in the new parliament, were especially apocalyptic.

The mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, who was re-elected with 74 per cent of the vote, regretted that the Duma had been "shorn of its balancing forces on the free-market right".

"The Duma needs a powerful centre," he said, "but it also needs a powerful left and right. It now has a left but no right."

Christopher Granville, a political analyst at United Financial Group, took a more upbeat view. He argued that although the reformists did not receive enough votes to enter the Duma, President Vladimir Putin would continue to listen to them. They had, after all, received four million votes and that could not be ignored.

Mr Granville argued that United Russia would use its majority in the Duma to continue Mr Putin's pro-Western reform programme without needing alliances with the three "conservative" parties: the Communists; Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democrats; and the new left-patriotic party, Rodina. He suggested, however, that some reforms, such as the deregulation of the gas sector could be postponed.

The pessimists see Russia returning to a one-party state after a decade in which no single force was dominant and one where United Russia's proportion of the vote was larger than any party's since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The optimists believe that Mr Putin is a genuine reformer, hamstrung only by the conservatism of his fellow countrymen, and that the vote for United Russia reflects a general satisfaction with Mr Putin and his rule.

Because United Russia's platform was so vague, it is hard to divine the direction the next Duma will take.

But Mr Putin will have to take account of the balance of forces the election revealed. That does not include only the conservative result, however. It also includes the divergence between the big cities of central and western Russia and the rest.

Moscow and St Petersburg are often considered the advance guard of Russia's politics. The electoral trends in these two cities may show what Russia's political landscape will look like after the next Duma elections in four years' time.